Do you as a writer feel guilty when you are not writing, and yet you assure yourself that you are not wasting time? That on the contrary you are getting in the mood or preparing for the task? As E.L. Doctorow once said:

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

But sometimes, with the difficult task of writing a query, a synopsis, and a cover letter, for instance, the fear of not getting published and of rejection get into you. So instead of writing you waste your time worrying and procrastinating.

We tend to classify ourselves as writers of a certain genre, mainly fiction or non-fiction. Lately though, there has been a surge in the non-fiction category, with the increase in the number of autobiographies and biographies released by the big publishing houses. Are we to believe what E.L. Doctorow wrote, that:

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

We writers of fiction, as Sinclair Lewis wrote, “have a power not given to anyone else. We have the power to bore people long after we are dead.”

Hence we must strive to be as excellent, as original and as entertaining as possible, in order to never bore our readers. And to do so we have to write, write and keep writing, for:

“When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.” Samuel Lover